3 Nephi 19:33 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and the multitude did hear and do bear record and their hearts were open and they [dod >js did 1|did ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] understand in their hearts the words which he prayed

Here scribe 2 wrote dod in 𝓟. The 1830 edition reads did, which is undoubtedly correct. Later, when Joseph Smith edited 𝓟 for the 1837 edition, he corrected the dod to did. Scribe 2’s dod appears to be a scribal slip rather than a misspelling of doed (which is what we might expect a child to say for the past-tense form of the verb do). There are a few cases in the history of the text where the irregular past-tense form has been replaced by a regular form:

Here in 3 Nephi 19:33, scribe 2 of 𝓟 seems to have simply written dod because he was used to writing do (note the preceding “do bear record”), not because he was trying to write a rather improbable past-tense doed. It should be noted that scribe 2 made this same scribal slip later on in 3 Nephi:

In this case, Oliver Cowdery later corrected the impossible dodst to didst when he proofed 𝓟 against 𝓞.

Summary: Maintain the past-tense form did in 3 Nephi 19:33 as well as the past-tense didst in 3 Nephi 22:1; scribe 2 of 𝓟 sometimes accidentally wrote did(st) as dod(st).

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 6

References